Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Conventionally, networks are deployed in tiered architectures utilizing a variety of transport media, e.g., optical filer, wireless, coaxial cable, twisted pair, etc., and layers. Most networks are evolving to use Ethernet as a dominant transmission protocol, such as Gigabit Ethernet (GE), 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) and other Ethernet variants. Ethernet is inherently asynchronous. More modern versions of Ethernet can be synchronous (Synchronous Ethernet referred to herein as “Sync-E”), at the physical level (i.e., International Telecommunication Unit Telecommunication Standardization Section (ITU-T) G.826x series of standards such as g.8261, g.8264). However, when building a useful network based on the Sync-E specifications, there is potential timing loop in the network when the topology of the network is complex. There are some research been done or on going to do with the timing loop. The current solutions, however, can only avoid the potential timing loop, or detect an existed timing loop. There is no way to automatically configure a new synchronization source without a timing loop. In order to avoid the timing loop, the user needs to manually configure the network, which heavily burdens the user.